The Secret of Stelle

Richard Kieninger is a softspoken, bespectacled Chicagoan who believes that he has a holy task--preparing for civilization's destruction. He and his followers are currently building a Noah's Ark community on the Illinois plains, where they hope to survive a series of disasters that they believe lie in store for most of the rest of mankind.

Kieninger claims impressive credentials for the job of leading his small, secretive survival sect. As he tells it, he has had 3,000 past lives, in one of which he was incarnated as the Pharaoh Akhnaton, in another as King David of Israel. Kieninger, who is now 45 this time around, has spent most of his present life as a woodworker.

His message is contained mainly in a paperback "biography" called The Ultimate Frontier, which he wrote under the name of Eklal Kueshana. In it, Kieninger predicts that economic depression and severe social upheaval will hit the U.S. in the mid-1970s, followed by an awful war and massive earthquakes at the turn of the century. By 2001, mankind will be virtually destroyed--but not Kieninger's followers.

The Stelle Group, as they call themselves, will have survived the early troubles in their self-sufficient community near Kankakee, Ill., and the later chaos by a more imaginative method--levitation. During the cataclysms, they will be off floating somewhere in the sky; afterward, they will come back down to Stelle and to the "lost continent" of Lemuria,* which will have re-emerged from the Pacific Ocean during the last catastrophes. On Lemuria they will create a city over which Christ will reign in the person of the Archangel Melchizedek. Not quite the Christ of the New Testament, though: typifying their syncretistic beliefs, the Stelle members believe that Christ borrowed Jesus' body for his earthly sojourn, and that Jesus was a sort of theological tourist, who studied with Brahmins in India, Buddhists in Nepal and sages in Persia.

Kieninger says that he was initiated into his bizarre vocation as a boy of twelve, when he was visited by a mysterious Dr. White who told him of his mission. Later, in his school home room, he met representatives of twelve immortal brotherhoods, who divulged further instructions. The brotherhoods still stay in contact with him, says Kieninger, and he dispenses Stelle's secrets by mail to several thousand followers around the U.S. So far, the Stelle Group has signed up only 130 full-fledged members, mostly middle-class Midwesterners like Kieninger himself, including a construction boss, an accountant, engineers and a former Methodist missionary.

The hardworking, tithing Stelle members have already put aside a half-million dollars for their survival city, where they will share all property and labor. In the flat Ford County farm land southwest of Kankakee, they have bought 320 acres and obtained necessary zoning permits. A woodworking factory is already in operation. Members are putting up other buildings on weekends. Ford County (pop. 16,000) does not know it yet, but according to the Stelle timetable the community is scheduled to be 10,000 strong by the mid-1970s, when the rest of U.S. civilization is expected to disintegrate.

* A favorite myth of cult groups in the U.S. and Great Britain, Lemuria--or Mu, as it is also called --is a Pacific Ocean version of Atlantis, a lost continent complete with a vanished civilization. Kieninger's group derives its name from the German Stelle, which means "place" and refers to their survival community, it is also the name of a onetime Lemuria cult leader, Robert Stelle.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.